I tend to really abuse Firefox tabs; before I found a tab unloader addon (UnloadTab) for it I would pretty regularly cause it to take up more than 4GB of RAM, which would be a real issue for 32bit. Also I do a lot of 3D design work in Blender and that has really been performing much better on 64bit distros, particularly when I get into realy large files and doing high res sculpting with it. Blender is another program I can often run up to several GB of RAM usage. I've also noticed a difference in performance with virtual world viewers for games like Second Life or InWorldz. When I have high settings on with 32bit viewers I notice every second or so when most of the updates fire that there is a fraction of a second pause while walking around, on the 64bit versions things stay nice and fluid while moving around except in the really poorly designed sims.
So for me at least, moving to 64bit distros offered some real advantages to my daily use cases. On the other hand I have a friend who has a 64bit capable computer that can't seem to run 32bit programs when running a 64bit distro, he is a long time Linux power user, so he knows enough about how to find and install the multiarch libs and to make sure things are set up properly. I am thinking it could be a kernel bug in the 64bit version that is affecting some piece of hardware in his system as we have explored pretty much everything else at this point. So for him, it has just been easier to stick to 32bit distros for now.



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